Tag: biological warfare

Former top State Dept investigator says COVID-19 outbreak may have resulted from bioweapons research accident

As top U.S. officials prepare to meet their Chinese counterparts for their first face-to-face meeting during the Biden administration, the State Department’s former lead investigator who oversaw the Task Force into the COVID-19 virus origin tells Fox News that he not only believes the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but that it may have been the result of research that the Chinese military, or People’s Liberation Army, was doing on a bioweapon.

“The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,” David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute told Fox News in an exclusive interview. “It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view, and I’m just one person, my view is it was a biological weapons program.”

Asher has long been a “follow the money” guy who has worked on some of the most classified intelligence investigations for the State Department and Treasury under both Democratic and Republican administrations. He led the team that uncovered the international nuclear procurement network run by the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, AQ Khan, and uncovered key parts of North Korea’s secret uranium enrichment. He believes the Chinese Communist Party has been involved in a massive cover-up during the past 14 months.

“And if you believe, as I do, that this might have been a weapons vector gone awry, not deliberately released, but in development and then somehow leaked, this has turned out to be the greatest weapon in history,” Asher said during a panel discussion at the Hudson Institute: The Origins of the COVID-10: Policy Implications and Lessons for the Future. “You’ve taken out 15 to 20 percent of global GDP. You’ve killed millions of people. The Chinese population has been barely affected. Their economies roared back to being number one in the entire G20.”

Keep reading

German University Study: Most Likely COVID Came From Wuhan Lab Leak

A prominent German scientist with the University of Hamburg has released findings of a year long study that concludes the most likely cause of the coronavirus pandemic is a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The study, was overseen by Professor Dr. Roland Wiesendanger, a world renowned nanotechnology expert, and three-time awardee of the European Research Council Advanced Grant.

While his latest study has not been peer reviewed at this time, Wiesendanger has authored or co-authored more than 600 scientific publications as well as several books.

The University of Hamburg issued a press release detailing the findings of Wiesendanger’s study.

It concludes that that “both the number and quality of the circumstantial evidence point to a laboratory accident at the virological institute in the city of Wuhan as the cause of the current pandemic.”

Keep reading

AP Highlights China’s Campaign to Promote Conspiracy Theory that U.S. Army Created Coronavirus

The Associated Press published an extensive report on Monday about the Chinese government’s promotion of an elaborate conspiracy theory that claims the Wuhan coronavirus is a bioweapon created in a U.S. Army laboratory.

As Breitbart News has been reporting for nearly a year, Chinese government officials have openly promoted this theory without providing any evidence that the Chinese coronavirus originated anywhere but Wuhan, China, where the first cases were reported. The Associated Press (AP) called China out as the world’s leading disseminator of coronavirus disinformation on Monday, telling the story of how “a rumor that the U.S. created the virus that causes COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] was weaponized by the Chinese government, spreading from the dark corners of the Internet to millions across the globe” through millions of social media posts.

Keep reading

WHO: COVID-19 didn’t leak from a lab. Also WHO: Maybe it did

The mission concluded that the second hypothesis, that the virus jumped from one species to another before infecting people, is “the most likely pathway.” While the mission reported that the direct spillover and food-chain ideas needed more investigation, Ben Embarek said the team had dismissed the idea that a lab-leak hypothesis as “extremely unlikely” and said it wouldn’t be pursued any further.

But days after the presser, the remarks by Ben Embarek and the team were undercut when World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said no hypotheses had been ruled out: “I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study.” Where the WHO investigators go from here remains to be seen.

Keep reading

US Scientist With Close Ties To Wuhan Lab Discussed Manipulating Bat-Based Coronaviruses Just Weeks Before Outbreak

A U.S. doctor who is part of the World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic discussed his work manipulating bat-based coronaviruses in labs just weeks before the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.

Dr. Peter Daszak, a close associate with China’s premier bat-based coronavirus researcher and a key figure in directing taxpayer funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, explained how easy it was to alter coronaviruses during a podcast interview filmed Dec. 9, 2019.

“You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily,” Daszak said. “Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus. Zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein — and we work with Ralph Baric at [the University of North Carolina] to do this — and insert the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab.”

It’s unclear where the coronavirus manipulation Daszak described in the podcast, also known as gain of function research, was conducted. Daszak did not return multiple requests for comment.

Keep reading

China lab leak is the ‘most credible’ source of the coronavirus outbreak, says top US government official, amid bombshell claims Wuhan scientist has turned whistleblower

One of America’s most senior government officials says the most ‘credible’ theory about the origin of coronavirus is that it escaped from a laboratory in China.

Matthew Pottinger, who is President Donald Trump‘s respected Deputy National Security Adviser, told politicians from around the world that even China’s leaders now openly admit their previous claims that the virus originated in a Wuhan market are false.

Mr Pottinger said that the latest intelligence points to the virus leaking from the top-secret Wuhan Institute of Virology, 11 miles from the market, saying: ‘There is a growing body of evidence that the lab is likely the most credible source of the virus.’

Keep reading

World Health Organization Pledges Not To Find ‘Guilty’ Party During Coronavirus Investigation In China

A team of scientists leading a World Health Organization mission to China to investigate the origins of the novel coronavirus is not looking to assign guilt to the communist regime over its failure to prevent the pandemic, a member of the delegation says.

“This is not about finding a guilty country or a guilty authority,” Fabian Leendertz, a scientist at the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s infectious disease agency, told Agence France-Presse (AFP), the French media outlet.

“This is about understanding what happened to avoid that in the future, to reduce the risk.”

Leendertz and a team of 10 other scientists will visit Wuhan, China in January to investigate how the virus jumped from animals to humans, according to AFP.

Most scientists believe that the virus transmitted from an animal to a human at one of Wuhan’s open-air food markets. Western health officials have long criticized the Chinese government for doing little to regulate the food markets, which can be breeding grounds for viruses like the coronavirus.

Health officials in the U.S. have accused the World Health Organization (WHO) of failing to confront Chinese leaders for withholding information about the coronavirus early on in the pandemic.

The WHO said in a statement citing Chinese officials on Jan. 14 that there was no evidence that the virus spread from person-to-person contact. That assurance, which is now known to be false, likely slowed the response of health officials outside China at a crucial point in the pandemic.

Keep reading

COVID-19 Is ‘Unrestricted Bioweapon’: Whistleblower Releases Second Paper Alleging ‘Large-Scale, Organized Scientific Fraud’

Li-Meng Yan, A Chinese virologist (MD, PhD) who worked in a WHO reference lab and fled her position at the University of Hong Kong, has published a second co-authored report, alleging that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, was not only created in a Wuhan lab, it’s an “unrestricted bioweapon” which was intentionally released.

“We used biological evidence and in-depth analyses to show that SARS-CoV-2 must be a laboratory product, which was created by using a template virus (ZC45/ZXC21) owned by military research laboratories under the control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government,” reads the paper.

SARS-CoV2 is a product of laboratory modification, which can be created in approximately six months using a template virus owned by a laboratory of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The fact that data fabrications were used to cover up the true origin of SARS-CoV 2 further implicates that the laboratory modification here is beyond simple gain-of-function research.

The scale and the coordinated nature of this scientific fraud signifies the degree of corruption in the fields of academic research and public health. As a result of such corruption, damages have been made both tot he reputation of the scientific community and to the well-being of the global community.

The report also claims that the RaTG13 virus which Wuhan “Batwoman” Dr. Zhengli Shi and colleagues say they obtained in bat feces in 2013 (and which is 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2), is fraudulent and also man made.

Since its publication, the RaTG13 virus has served as the founding evidence for the theory that SARS-CoV-2 must have a natural origin. However, no live virus or an intact genome of RaTG13 have ever been isolated or recovered. Therefore, the only proof for the “existence” of RaTG13 in nature is its genomic sequence published on GenBank.

The report goes on to say that the RaTG13 genome could easily be fabricated, and that “an entry on GenBank, which in this case is equivalent to the existence of an assembled viral genomic sequence and its associated sequencing reads, is not a definitive proof that this viral genome is correct or real,” and that the process for sequencing DNA itself “leaves room for potential fraud.”

Keep reading

New Evidence Implicates CIA in 1971 Attack on Cuba with African Swine Fever Virus

“Cuban Outbreak of Swine Fever Linked to CIA” headlined a January 9, 1977, article by Drew Featherston and John Cummings in Newsday, a Long Island, New York, daily paper. It began,

With at least the tacit backing of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officials, operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971. Six weeks later an outbreak of the disease forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic.

A U.S. intelligence source told Newsday he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at a U.S. Army base and CIA training ground in the Panama Canal Zone, with instructions to turn it over to the anti-Castro group.

The 1971 outbreak, the first and only time the disease has hit the Western Hemisphere, was labeled the “most alarming event” of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. African swine fever is a highly contagious and usually lethal viral disease that infects only pigs and, unlike swine flu, cannot be transmitted to humans. There were no human deaths in the outbreak, but all production of pork, a Cuban staple, came to a halt, apparently for several months. . . .

The U.S. intelligence source said that early in 1971 he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at Ft. Gulick, an Army base in the Panama Canal Zone. The CIA also operated a paramilitary training center for career personnel and mercenaries at Ft. Gulick. . . .

Another man involved in the operation, a Cuban exile who asked not to be identified, said he was on the trawler where the virus was put aboard at a rendezvous point off Bocas del Toro, Panama. He said the trawler carried the virus to Navassa Island, a tiny, deserted, U.S.-owned island between Jamaica and Haiti. From there, after the trawler made a brief stopover, the container was taken to Cuba and given to other operatives on the southern coast near the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay in late March, according to the source on the trawler.

It was an explosive story, reprinted in newspapers across the country. The CIA officially denied it six days later, in response to a request from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, but the Newsday reporters had cited so many corroborating sources, with such specific details, that the denial was not widely believed.

The most compelling reason for trusting the credibility of the Newsday report was that the only place in the Western Hemisphere where the virus was known to have been kept before the outbreak in Cuba was at the secret Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) laboratory off the eastern tip of Long Island, where local Newsday reporters had been cultivating sources since the one and only time reporters had been allowed inside in October 1971.

Plum Island had hosted the U.S. Army Chemical Corps base at Fort Terry from 1952 to 1956. According to Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons since 1945 by Mark Wheelis and Lajos Rózsa, the mission at Fort Terry was “to establish and pursue a program of research and development of certain anti-animal (BW) agents.” (a.k.a. biological weapons) The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) took over from the Army in 1956.

President Richard Nixon ordered biological weapons research to cease in 1969, but in 1975 the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence revealed that the CIA had continued to maintain a stockpile of biological agents and toxins in violation of the order.

Keep reading

Engineering Contagion: UPMC, Corona-Thrax And “The Darkest Winter”

The recently obtained documents reveal that the BSL-3 lab that is part of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research is conducting eyebrow-raising research involving combining SARS-CoV-2 with Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax infection. Per the documents, anthrax is being genetically engineered by a researcher, whose name was redacted in the release, so that it will express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is the part of the coronavirus that allows it to gain access into human cells. The researcher asserts that “the [genetically engineered anthrax/SARS-CoV-2 hybrid] can [be] used as a host strain to make SARS-CoV-2 recombinant S protein vaccine,” and the creation of said vaccine is the officially stated purpose of the research project. The documents were produced by the University of Pittsburgh’s Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), which held an emergency meeting on June 22nd of this year to “discuss specific protocols involving research with the coronavirus,” which included a vote on the aforementioned proposal.

Keep reading